The Metamorphosis, symbolic story by Austrian writer Franz Kafka, published in German as Die Verwandlung in 1915.

The opening sentence of The Metamorphosis has become one of the most famous in Western literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” (Although Samsa has sometimes been described as a cockroach, the German word Ungeziefer does not refer to a particular bug.) His tyrannical father forces him to hide in his bedroom, and, after his father throws an apple at him, Gregor slowly dies from both his family’s neglect and his own guilty despair.

...through which Europe was compelled to live during the Hitler regime. But its significance is more subtle and universal; one of the elements is original sin and another filial guilt. In the story The Metamorphosis (1915) a young man changes into an enormous insect, and the nightmare of alienation can go no further.